


Once again, with feeling

by brodmann



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Denial, Guilt, Imprisonment, M/M, Post-UTRH, Unrequited, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 17:12:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15823353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brodmann/pseuds/brodmann
Summary: Bruce finds Jason amongst the rubble in the aftermath of the explosion and tries to make things right.





	Once again, with feeling

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place after the events of Under The Red Hood. Also makes reference to Nightwing: Year One, particularly [these](https://78.media.tumblr.com/15307202f1646a11e22a8cd6d1109141/tumblr_pe6z88Dala1w84y31o1_1280.jpg) [two](https://78.media.tumblr.com/6bf8be07dd90f5f0d6b8b6c8ab576c2c/tumblr_pe6z88Dala1w84y31o2_1280.jpg) pages.
> 
> Thank you to [ictus](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ictus) for the beta and some key suggestions!

Static feedback from the zeta tube fills the room as the Watchtower’s security system introduces its visitor.

“ _Constantine - comma - John. Welcome to the Justice League Headquarters._ ”

You watch him materialise onto the platform.

“Here you go,” he says, making his way over to you with one hand outstretched. In it, he holds what you asked him to make you.

You take it. The metal band sits in your palm, heavy as sin.

Ten years ago, you came to learn that John Constantine secured precious artefacts within his then-place of residence, the House of Mystery, via extraordinary means. Removal of the artefact from the premises resulted in the artefact and all matter in contact with it to disengage from the material realm and reappear in the House. It was an elegant security measure, one you appreciated, but there had been no reason to make use of your knowledge. Not then.

Constantine doesn’t leave when you dismiss him. Instead, he trails after you into the analysis lab. When you position yourself in front of the microscope, he invites himself to take a seat beside you.

“No ‘thank you’?” he asks.

You say nothing, but it doesn’t discourage him.

“Alright, be that way.” He sighs extravagantly. “Now, look— I know it ain’t my place to ask, but I need to, or else I’m going to lose sleep over this. What are you planning to do with it?”

Your hand pauses over the microscope’s focus knob. It’s unsurprising that he should ask; the measurements you gave him had been disturbingly exact.

“You were paid for your services,” you tell him. You don’t look away from the microscope’s eyepiece. “You weren’t paid to ask questions.”

Constantine makes a noise like a collapsing tyre. “Alright, alright. Excuse me.”

The zeta tube hums as it transports him back to earth, leaving you alone in the Watchtower.

 

 

The metal band makes a synthetic hum when it snaps closed around Jason’s neck. A neon green light appears where the ends of the band meet; when it’s gone, it takes the fissure in the band with it, leaving behind a plane of seamless metal.

First, you turn off the infusion pump pushing the steady stream of pentobarbital into Jason’s body. Second, you remove the cannula from Jason’s hand. Third, you unstrap him from the medical bay. Fourth, you lift him up into your arms and carry him out of the Cave.

His temple bumps against your chest as you take the stairs. It reminds you of all those times he fell asleep against you in the car.

It feels like something finally sliding into place, to lay him down in his bedroom. Outside, the first snow of winter begins to fall.

You carry the sound of Jason’s breathing with you when you retire to your room.

 

 

The barbiturates aren’t due to wear off until well into noon. Knowing that, you leave for Wayne Enterprises early. Alfred congratulates you on your new sense of joie de vivre.

In your office, you configure the security interface to show you all of the Manor’s motion-activated video feeds. As you expect, Jason tries to escape as soon as he wakes up.

He attempts every conceivable means of escape. He investigates every window and door. Every time, the band transports him back into the Manor’s reading room. Each failed attempt tightens the tension in his shoulders.

After the collar transports him back into the Manor for the fifty-fourth time, he falls down to his knees and screams. The Manor’s security cameras don’t capture audio, but you see it in the way his veins strain from his throat.

After that, he tears through the Manor to look for you.

When he realises that you aren’t there, he begins destroying what he can.

His rage is a cyclone ripping through your parents’ home. He upends tables, breaks mirrors. Empties cabinets lined with china onto the floor, knocks over bureaus, catapults furniture at the walls. He’s on his fifth room when Alfred, alerted by the noise, rushes in.

Like fire suddenly deprived of oxygen, Jason stops.

You watch him stand in jilted silence as Alfred begins to clean up. After a few minutes, he joins in to help.

He doesn’t try to break anything in the Manor again after that, but he reopens the wound on his neck another five times before he stops trying to remove the collar.

 

 

You keep yourself away from the Manor for a month. As Batman you maintain your routine between the Cave, greater Gotham and the Watchtower; as a civilian you rotate between Wayne Enterprises and an apartment on the upper east side. You tell yourself that your absence will give him time to adapt to his new circumstances, to be soothed and mollified by Alfred’s care, and to prepare himself for the inevitability of your arrival.

It’s almost the truth.

When you return, you leave evidence of your existence around the Manor: documents on the study, un-shelved books in the reading room. You expect a confrontation as soon as Jason notices you’re there.

Instead, you discover that he structures his day around you.

You sleep under the same roof. Wake up. Eat. You still don’t see him anywhere other than on your monitor, through the grainy lens of a camera.

Jason’s routine is static. He leaves his room after you’ve left for Wayne Enterprises, eats dinner early, retires to his room before you come back and doesn’t come out again until you leave for patrol.

A significant portion of the time he spends outside of his room is dedicated to exploring the Manor. A new portion of it every day, his eyes scanning the milieu and his hands skirting over the walls, over picture frames and table tops, as if he’s grounding himself in touch.

You know that his actions stretch beyond the simple tenants of nostalgia. Jason is cataloguing the locations of the Manor’s security cameras. Once he enters a new room, he never leaves until he finds it.

One day, he spent an hour staring into the lens of the camera in his room. He said nothing and did nothing. Only stared until, in the safety of your office, you found yourself looking away in shame.

On another day, late in March, you saw him laugh— genuinely laugh, from the pit of his belly— for the first time. It diffused through his body, shaking his shoulders, crinkling the skin around his eyes and his mouth.

 

 

The first time you encounter him is an accident.

You come back from the office earlier than usual. When you step into the dining hall, Jason is still seated at the table, mid-chew. He has one knee drawn up to his chest, the other folded underneath him, one elbow on the table.

He freezes when you come into the room. You watch his eyes widen. Whether he’ll flee or attack is an outcome that you can predict with as much accuracy as the outcome of a coin toss.

All you can hear is the sound of your own heartbeat, trilling like a hummingbird in your ears.

“You’re home early, Master Bruce,” Alfred says from behind you.

Just like that, whatever had been there— whatever direction the dominoes would have fallen had this been allowed to continue— dissolves into nothingness. Jason looks over to Alfred; his grip on his fork relaxes.

“Shall I prepare your dinner?”

You swallow around the lump in your throat. “Yes, please. Thank you, Alfred.”

At times, it’s best to follow the lead of others.

You let Alfred choose your seat for you. When he returns with your dinner he places it at the head of the table, your father’s spot and yours, one seat space away from Jason.

You sit. Jason eyes you warily. It’s the first time you’ve seen him in the flesh since you carried him to his room.

If it wasn’t for the metal band around his neck, the sight of him would be disarmingly domestic. Jason is in a cotton tee and draw-string pants, drumming his fingers against the mahogany. He watches you like he’s reading you, slowly and with razor-sharp precision, one line at a time. Searching for something— what that is, you don’t know.

Something in you expects him to say something. Anything.

Your spoon scrapes the bottom of your bowl. Jason remains silent.

The uneventfulness of it all settles in. Before you excuse yourself from the table, you thank him.

 

 

He’s seated at the dining table when you return the next day. And the next day, and the next, and the next.

Silently, you eat together.

In July, uncharacteristically torrential rain arrives without warning as soon as you step out of the tower. The brief trip to the car is enough to soak you to the bone. You return to the Manor wet and dripping, and as you seat yourself adjacent to Jason at the dining table, you shift in your chair. The wet fabric of your suit against the seat cushion makes a peculiar, suspicious sound.

Jason snorts around the spoonful of soup in his mouth, sending food bits flying across the table. He looks you in the face; when you catch his eye, his laughter intensifies.

It’s guileless. Uninhibited. You remember how addictive having him around had been and how painful it had been afterwards, to stand in a room knowing that it had once been filled with the sound of him. Without warning, you find yourself laughing too.

Months of tension broken, just like that. It’s as surprising as his existence.

As the laughter bubbles down, Jason side-eyes you with a look of irony and returns to his meal.

The silence between you is lighter when the air clears. It stays that way the next day, and the next, and the next. You still thank him after every meal.

 

 

“Something up that I should know about?” Clark asks you in the aftermath of a mission. His eyes are brightly lit. “You’ve seemed… er. Happier lately.”

You know that Clark can hear a pin drop on the other side of the world, and you know that he sees more than he lets on.

“Do I.” You let your tone fall flat.

As usual, to Clark, it’s water off a duck’s back. “Yeah,” he says. “You really do.”

You nod. “Your observation has been noted.”

 

 

If you were a careless man, you would have lost track of how long your arrangement with Jason remained stable.

You eat with him every day. He’ll nod, just slightly, when you come into the room. Sometimes he hums; sometimes he’s brought a book to read. How much he does or doesn’t look at you becomes polished in its assured nonchalance. He doesn’t speak to you and you don’t dare speak to him.

It’s more than enough.

So it blindsides you when you look up from your desk one morning to see Jason leaning against the doorframe. His arms are crossed over his chest. The collar of his sweater dips into his chest. Outside, the chill of October has begun to set in.

“Hey. Bruce.”

The last time you heard him speak, he’d screamed  _it’s him or me— you have to decide_.

“Want to watch a movie together?” he asks. Casually. As if this is something he asks you every other day.

Your throat goes dry.

“Yes, I do,” you rush to reply. “As long as you’d like to.”

Your response startles an amused snort out of him. He looks away, shaking his head to himself, as if whatever he’d been expecting has been confirmed and now he needs nothing more from you.

“I just wanted to see how you’d react if I asked,” he says.

With that, he pushes himself off the doorframe and disappears behind the wall.

Your cowardice confines you to the study desk.

 

 

Alfred sets the tea tray beside you with a pointed clatter. “Sir. I wish to speak about Master Jason.”

“It’s nice to have him back in the Manor,” you say.

“Yes it is, admittedly, but that’s not my concern. Perhaps it would be better if—”

“Don’t concern yourself with it. I have it under control.”

“Forgive my crassness, Master Bruce,” he says, stern. “But it is not your control I have a problem with. It is _inhumane_ for you to keep him here as if he’s—”

“I said I have it under control.” You maintain the square of your shoulders. You have only ever spoken to Alfred in this tone of voice a handful of times in your life. “That means I don’t want to hear it. Understood?”

The silence that stretches before you is wide and gaping. Finally, Alfred mutters, “Understood.”

 

 

Sometimes, after patrol, you sit at the monitor in the Cave and watch Jason sleep.

Tonight, when you turn on the monitor, he’s—

The sheets have been pushed down to the foot of the bed and he’s on his back, three fingers buried inside himself, his other hand wrapped around his cock, his hips rolling off the bed. Sweat slicks his hair to his forehead. His mouth opens to mouth the same name over and over.

You can read lips with near-perfect precision in ten different languages, but tonight you tell yourself that you can’t tell what he’s saying.

You shut off the monitor.

 

 

In December, Jason misses dinner for the first time.

You find him in your study later in the night, lying on his back, idly stroking the carpet while his other hand balances a glass of whiskey on his stomach. The entire room stinks of alcohol.

“Jason?”

His head lolls to greet you as you step into the room. The smile on his face is lazy and lop-sided, as if one side is lagging behind the other.

“You been having fun?” he asks.

Your first instinct is to go over to him.

As soon as you kneel down beside him, the disarming slowness of his intoxication disappears. He throws his drink at you. It’s a distraction, a fraction of a second lost to the sensation of alcohol stinging your eyes that allows him to grab your wrists and pin you against the floor. He straddles your hips. When you look up to his face, the lazy, easy-going smile is gone, replaced by something dark and sharp.

“I _said_.” He leans over and snarls into your ear. “Have you been having fun keeping me prisoner in your little game of house?”

You don’t know what to say, so you resort to saying what you think you should.

“You were out of control. I couldn’t allow you to roam free in Gotham anymore.”

“Oh yeah?” He pulls back. The answer seems to excite him, as if he’s been waiting for you to say it. “Then why am I not in Arkham, Bruce? Black Gate? Why not throw me into where you throw all your other rogues?”

“I couldn’t trust you to not break free.”

Jason snorts gleefully. “Of course! Because you can trust Two-Face to play nice, right?” he returns with ease. “The Joker? As if all your baddies breaking out of the likes of Arkham and Black Gate aren’t the oldest stories in the book by now. Fucking hell, Bruce. If you’re going to lie to me, at least make it good! This is insulting!”

And what can you say to that?

Jason lifts your hand and presses your palm against his neck. You feel the cool metal band; poking out from under it is the scar you gave him, fully healed.

“You know what this collar reminds me of? One of our very first memories.” He leans into your hand, sighing wistfully. “Man, as a kid growing up, I heard stories about you. I used to think to myself, oh yeah, if Batman ever catches me stealing a loaf of bread, he’ll turn me into a paraplegic. Whatever. But I never expected that the man himself— the legend!— would take little old me back to his big scary cave, no siree! Much less tie me to a chair, gag me and proposition me to be his sidekick.”

Jason grins lecherously. Not once do his eyes leave yours.

“Now look where we are. You know what they say about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks. You haven’t changed at all, Bruce. Your tricks just got more… hm. Sophisticated.”

There are no words you can use to defend yourself. Nothing you know to do. You look down to your hand against his neck, framing his jaw.

“Jason,” you say, uselessly, and you know it’ll count for nothing.

The joy falls away from his face.

“What did you think was going to go down, Bruce? Did you think that if you kept me here long enough, I’d become docile? Let all of it go? That everything would suddenly be okay again?” As he speaks, his voice grows raw and trembling. Pained. As if he’s pleading with you. “Are you really that naïve?” he asks.

For a moment, he almost sounds as if he had wanted this too.

You taste whiskey when he kisses you. Gentle at first, then hard enough to draw blood. His hips grind down on yours.

It’s reflex when you fling him away. You fail to control your throw and he collides with the wall with enough force to shake the windows. A glass vase falls to the floor and shatters at his feet.

“Jason, I’m sorry—” you begin, but he isn’t listening.

He’s laughing. He laughs and laughs and laughs, high-pitched and manic as he clutches his stomach. When you reach out to him, he curls away.

The grandfather clock chimes. Ten o’clock. You leave for patrol.

 

 

You tell yourself that you’ll leave Jason alone for a week. Allow the dust to settle before you tackle the ground you’ve lost.

You can fix this. You will fix this.

 

 

Jason disappears.

Once you realise he’s missing, you comb carefully through every security feed. You search every inch of the Manor, and then every inch of the grounds. You search the city.

Nothing.

It’s significant that Tim visits you from Blüdhaven a few days later. You patrol together, and as the night draws to a close you return to the Cave.

“How did you find out?” you ask him.

Tim, to his benefit, hesitates for only a second before he replies. “Alfred told me.”

“And how did you remove the device?”

“I consulted Zatanna.”

You nod. “I see.”

Tim stays for an additional three nights to wrap up a case before he returns to Blüdhaven.

Once he’s gone, there you are. Alone with your thoughts.


End file.
